Muddy African Elephant in Wasa National Park

Africa

Ivan Hurst Africa 12 August 2016 Hits: 1538

Introduction

Hello, and welcome, especially if you jumped straight into this part of my travelogue.

So far I have only been to Africa twice, once with Encounter Overland. It was my final and longest trip with Encounter Overland. Then nearly forty years later with my son.

In Encounter Overland terms it was in fact two trips. The first being London to Johannesburg, and the second, the return journey from Johannesburg to London. Each leg was meant to be 16-17 weeks, and that is what the passengers had paid for. There was also a layover period in Southern Africa for me.

Each trip will appear below, under the Subcategories, as and when stories are written about that trip. Some trips will have more stories than others, and some stories will be awash with wonderful wild photos.

Change of host Sept 2023

In the begining of August 2023 I transfered my ivanhurst.me.uk sites, including this one from 123-reg to IONOS. It was meant to be a simple task. However, that was to to be the case. The reason for the move was primarily the hugh increase in price that 123-reg was applying regarding email boxes. Previously, the upto 500 of the boxes were included in the various hosting packages I had. Now they were going to charge for each mailbox based on size, and as far as I could make out, this was going to cost me nearly £2,000. This was not acceptable, and I did not get satisfactory answers from support. So I turned of all the auto renews and stated to move sites and domains accross to IONOS.

Travel data problems

This is where it starts to get a little technical.

The site is built on a content management system, CMS, using Joomla. Joomla is moving forward and version 3.10.?? is being discontinued. Future developments are for version 4.??

Similarly, PHP 7 is being replaced with PHP 8.

Part of the migration is relatively simple, I have already changed to a new template which works on the new platforms.

However, some of the helper applications, which work within Joomla are not yet ready.

Fabrik is one of those applications, if fact a significant 'Joomla Custom Website Application Builder'.

Site refresh Easter 2021

I decided to give the site a bit of a refresh over Easter 2021 and install a new template and some additional functions. One of the things I didn't like about the old site was the delay in text appearing which probably meant some people left before the content appeared. This has been corrected now.